Food for Thought

[L Verge]

(08-09-2019 09:35 PM)mike86002000 Wrote:  The "other Dr. Mudd House" does appear to be the Griffin house. It was demolished ten years later than I remembered.
Mike

The second photo is exactly like I remember the Griffin house when I was a child. I always wanted to sneak inside, but my folks knew the danger. Grafton and Colorado Streets are still there near the back of the southwestern part of Crestview Subdivision. The land was leveled a lot, and there was first an elementary school on those streets. Now it has been converted into a county police station, and the local Red Cross office shares some space.

The old house sat on a hill that I named Mockingbird Hill (guess which song and artist was popular then!). We would go up there because some of the sweetest wild strawberries in south county grew on the property. And then came the bulldozers.

I would double-check Dr. Sidney Emanuel Mudd, because I do not think that U.S. Representative Sydney Mudd, who married the Griffin daughter, was a medical or educational doctor. Maybe "this" Mudd is another generation?

If you worked for the Texaco station outside of T.B., was it leased and operated by Jimmy Cook at that time? They ran the station for years, and right across the road was another gas station run by the brother, Buddy Cook. I was a customer of Jimmy's for all mechanical work until his widow retired the business about 6-7 years ago. Haven't found a decent mechanic since.

I would suspect that both of your photos were taken by James Wilfong, an elderly friend of ours through the Surratt House, who was instrumental in saving old homes as well as photographing those that would be lost. I think he retired to Calvert County in the 1980s and continued to support historic preservation. He was our county's answer to the HABS project.

As for the T.B. stone, I believe that the original Thomas Brooke marked the property stone. Part of the estate extended past Brandywine and into the Croom area, where the name is still attached to at least a Methodist church. As for the stone itself, I don't have time to mess with the Smithsonian and analysis. In this case, I'm afraid that I am going to stick with explanations of my ancestors and other old-timers that I learned from.

You would be hard pressed to find these certain types of gray fieldstones indigenous to our area, I believe. Maryland fieldstones are more prevalent in Montgomery and other northern counties, and the ones that I have seen (and one used to be part of Surratt House grounds when a northern restoration architect decided to make it the step down from the kitchen door -- biggest safety hazard you could imagine!) are larger, chunkier, and rust-colored.

To our readers: Ain't it fun to watch native Marylanders quibble over their territory? Kinda reminds you of what the Civil War era and Maryland, the border state, must have been like...

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(08-10-2019 02:41 PM)L Verge Wrote:  

(08-09-2019 09:35 PM)mike86002000 Wrote:  The "other Dr. Mudd House" does appear to be the Griffin house. It was demolished ten years later than I remembered.
Mike

The second photo is exactly like I remember the Griffin house when I was a child. I always wanted to sneak inside, but my folks knew the danger. Grafton and Colorado Streets are still there near the back of the southwestern part of Crestview Subdivision. The land was leveled a lot, and there was first an elementary school on those streets. Now it has been converted into a county police station, and the local Red Cross office shares some space.

The old house sat on a hill that I named Mockingbird Hill (guess which song and artist was popular then!). We would go up there because some of the sweetest wild strawberries in south county grew on the property. And then came the bulldozers.

I would double-check Dr. Sidney Emanuel Mudd, because I do not think that U.S. Representative Sydney Mudd, who married the Griffin daughter, was a medical or educational doctor. Maybe "this" Mudd is another generation?

If you worked for the Texaco station outside of T.B., was it leased and operated by Jimmy Cook at that time? They ran the station for years, and right across the road was another gas station run by the brother, Buddy Cook. I was a customer of Jimmy's for all mechanical work until his widow retired the business about 6-7 years ago. Haven't found a decent mechanic since.

I would suspect that both of your photos were taken by James Wilfong, an elderly friend of ours through the Surratt House, who was instrumental in saving old homes as well as photographing those that would be lost. I think he retired to Calvert County in the 1980s and continued to support historic preservation. He was our county's answer to the HABS project.

As for the T.B. stone, I believe that the original Thomas Brooke marked the property stone. Part of the estate extended past Brandywine and into the Croom area, where the name is still attached to at least a Methodist church. As for the stone itself, I don't have time to mess with the Smithsonian and analysis. In this case, I'm afraid that I am going to stick with explanations of my ancestors and other old-timers that I learned from.

You would be hard pressed to find these certain types of gray fieldstones indigenous to our area, I believe. Maryland fieldstones are more prevalent in Montgomery and other northern counties, and the ones that I have seen (and one used to be part of Surratt House grounds when a northern restoration architect decided to make it the step down from the kitchen door -- biggest safety hazard you could imagine!) are larger, chunkier, and rust-colored.

To our readers: Ain't it fun to watch native Marylanders quibble over their territory? Kinda reminds you of what the Civil War era and Maryland, the border state, must have been like...

OK, I'm on a geological roll... Have yet to find reference to English fieldstones found at Maryland ports, but here's a link to a report from North Carolina, where the dumping got serious enough to start damming up the port.
Ballast Stones
by William S. Powell, 2006

Ballast stone thrown from the vessels of Amadas & Barlowe at Roanoke Island, 1584. [photo would not copy]

Ballast stones, whose weight stabilized empty ships, have been found at various colonial landing sites along the North Carolina coast. Although there are no known records, residents and local historians believe that these stones, found in coastal counties along the shore and under water, were used as ballast in early sailing vessels. In the colonies, the market for manufactured goods from abroad was limited, but local produce such as lumber, naval stores, grain, and tobacco was exported from North Carolina. On the westbound voyage, ships needed weight to lower them in the water to keep them from capsizing; large stones filled the ships' hold, but after they arrived this ballast was thrown overboard to be replaced by products from the colony.

Jettisoned stones began to clog the harbors so badly that in 1769 North Carolina political leader Richard Caswell presented a bill in the colonial Assembly to appoint a ballast master who would regulate this activity in the vicinity of Ocracoke Inlet. The problem persisted, however, and in 1784 the General Assembly passed an act that prohibited ballast stones from being thrown into the channel of the Cape Fear River. Thereafter, before docking, ships were required to dispose of their ballast prior to reaching the low watermark. Stones left in shallower water undoubtedly provided the cobblestones still seen in some of the streets along the river in Wilmington.

Another source of info:

Q - When did ships start using water as ballast?
Hi all, bit of a randomly specific question here.

For context, I'm a PhD student researching marine invasive species that mainly spread through fouling ballast water tanks in ships. I'm looking at areas that have seen shipping transport for millenia (north east Europe and northwest Pacific), but these species wouldn't have been transported in great number until the adoption of water as ballast. I'm using genetic techniques to build an invasion pathway history, but want to see if what I've built roughly corresponds to the actual shipping history of the regions.

To that end, does anyone here have any insight as to when ballast water began being used en masse by the shipping community? From what I've found online, the 1800s pops up as a rough idea, but there's nothing more specific than that.

A - Hi naval architect here: The use of water ballast in ships really begins with the advent of iron and steal hulled ships. Prior to this ships used mostly large rocks, earth, or chunks of metal as ballast.

There were several reasons for this, but the biggest was that storing liquids securely in wood is difficult. Barrels are the only viable option and these take up a lot of space for their weight and degrade over time. Far easier and safer just to throw a bunch of rocks in the bottom. Metal storage tanks can be made water tight in almost any shape.

Another factor is the weight of cargo relative to the size of the ship. For open ocean vessels in the age of wooden ships, the weight of cargo was small compared to the total weight of the ship. Compare this to oil or ore carries today where most of the ship is cargo storage space. Look at pictures of loaded and unloaded oil tankers and you will see what I mean. When you have such a large difference in displacement between loaded and in-loaded stability really starts to be a problem so a ballast system that can be rapidly adjusted with pumps becomes more important.

So the short answer is that pumped water ballast comes with the advent of iron hulled ships. Sorry I don't have an exact date. If I had to guess I would say it starts in the 1830s really took off sometime in the 1860s. That said the other implied part of your question is when did it become common for iron hulled merchant ships traveling internationally. This is a slightly different question which depends more on the advent of efficient steam engines. I would suggest that a reasonably defendable start date for your question is the first trans Atlantic voyage of the great western in 1838, or the SS Great Britain in 1845.

Me - Since my great-grandfather was born in the 1830s and saw the stone, and since Thomas Brooke received his lands in the 1690s (I think), that fits beautifully into the timeline of when tobacco ships would be dumping rock ballasts in Maryland's southern tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay.

Just found that there is a book discussing the history of ballast stones around the world and how they have shaped civilizations: http://objectmatters.ruinmemories.org/ho...h-history/